Although an airbag system can often save an adult's life, it can cause serious damage, or even death, to a small child or infant. When traveling with a small child or infant, a driver may wish to turn on or off a passenger seat airbag. Manual airbag systems are problematic for a number of reasons. For example, a driver may not know how to turn the airbag system on or off. Additionally, the driver may forget to reactivate the airbag system upon removing the small child, which might result in the death of an adult riding in the passenger seat.
Traditional automatic airbag deployment systems have relied heavily upon pressure sensors to determine whether an airbag should be activated for a passenger seat. However, these systems are unreliable, and inherently unsafe, because the driver may place additional objects in the passenger seat along with a child. The additional weight may be enough to activate the passenger seat airbag in these traditional automatic airbag systems and can cause serious harm, or even death, to the child in the passenger seat in the event of an accident.